Photo: Sora Shimazaki/Pixabay.

By Frank Martin

Hackers have broken whatever caution they were able to maintain prior Covid-19 pandemic and started this summer a new and bigger attack.

According to expert’s warnings the coronavirus has certainly accelerated the use of digital tools in business, at home, and especially in the tourism industry.

A red-light warning states that cyberattacks are operating with increasing scope in travel and tourism industry, facing strong tensions in 2022 in its efforts to a reopening after the epidemic.

Nowadays, sensitive personal and corporate data is transmitted online and stored in databases, methods that make it a very attractive target for hackers.

The pirate manipulations look for obtaining more personal financial gains in a world sector extremely turbulent due to the aftermath of the pandemic and the negative influence of the war in Ukraine.

Studies of specialized firms reveal that cyberattacks are behind actions in order to overcome  ways  to be the detected. One of these is identity theft, a very common scam. The most common instruments for this crime are promotional emails, news emails and even genuine electronic messages issued by companies and intercepted for misuse.

Warnings certainly abound because cybercriminals are well-trained in creating emails that appear legitimate, and two types of these are known as whale phishing and spear phishing emails.

“Whaling phishing attacks target company ‘bigwigs’, such as C-level managers, with the intent to steal data or money. Phishing attacks targeting individual company employees have the intention to violate their network and access their computer systems”, underlines a specialized analysis.

Also mentioned are the so-called DDoS attacks, that is, distributed denial of service attacks that seek financial gain by stopping the online services of a company.

The cybercriminal floods the company’s servers and systems with an abrupt increase in Internet traffic, effectively shutting down services.

Malware and ransomware, “malicious” programs that infest and damage computers in order to access data stores, are very dangerous.

“The cybercriminal blocks access to the system and holds it for ransom. Attacks can destroy data, spy on it, or install more infectious and harmful malware on your system or network,” the digital study warned.

A proven fact is that the pandemic has revealed how interconnected all businesses are and how increasing digitization has led the world’s population onto a new trajectory of cyber threats and attacks.

The problem is so big that the Center for Cybersecurity of the World Economic Forum has published the Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2022 that presents the forecast and critical findings compiled from more than 120 global cyber leaders with perceptions, concerns and predictions about it.

The examples of attacks grow. In the summer of this month of July, a study published in Portugal states that cyberattacks increased by 60% in the national tourism sector.

According to the discovery, hackers and cybercriminals are taking advantage of people eager to travel again after the pandemic lockdowns.

A report by the international entity Threat Intelligence Report of Check Point Research, the global average number of attacks against organizations in the tourism and leisure sector has increased by 60% compared to the first half of June 2021.

Rui Duro, Country Manager of Check Point Software Technologies in Portugal explained that “for

For many of us, this may be the first time we have traveled abroad since the pandemic, and as such, there may be certain elements of our travel routines that we may have forgotten, including our cybersecurity hygiene habits, which is music to our ears. from opportunistic hackers looking to take advantage of laid-back attitudes and unprotected devices.”

Another report, although worldwide, revealed that the planetary average Rui Duro, Country Manager of Check Point Software Technologies in Portugal of weekly attacks against organizations related to travel and leisure increased in June 2022.

Some computer security tips for this summer only have even been published.

FM